All God's Children

by Aaron Gwyn

  “That’s no kind of ending,” Levi said.

  Juan shrugged. “It is what happens.”

  The men began to mumble all round. This conclusion didn’t suit them either. They commenced telling him so.

  Isaac Casner said, “That won’t do at all, Mister Juan.”

  “No,” said Juan. “It is not a story Texans enjoy to hear. I must rather tell that I am wrapped in a kafan and taken for burial to rise and swim to freedom. Something of this kind. Some historia salvaje. If it is a law that releases me, the Texan is not interest.”

  McClusky had been shaking his head to where I thought it’d come off his shoulders.

  “You must take these men for fools,” he said.

  “No,” said Juan. “Not fools. They are Texans.”

  I said, “I think we expected something else, is all. Being how you were snatched up. I think we’d imagined you’d absquatulate a little more . . .” I trailed off, hunting a word.

  “Dramatic-like,” Levi said.

  Again, Juan smiled. He began to refill his pipe and I knew that his story was over. Or, at least, this was all the story we would get.

  * * *

  I couldn’t get to sleep that night. I tossed and turned Juan’s tale in my mind. I felt that if McClusky hadn’t started to interrupt and insult him, Juan might have told us about the torments of Istanbul. Perhaps not doing so was his way of punishing the Irishman. Perhaps, if it was just the two of us talking, he’d tell me.

  Around midnight, I stole across camp and knelt there beside him. Was I really going to wake him just so he could finish his story?

  He said, “Captain.”

  Soon as his eyes opened, I lost my nerve. I wasn’t going to pester him about the hell he’d referenced—the many hells, I think he’d said. There was a darker pain in him than what came from being taken from his home and family, darker even than the torturous labor they’d set him to. I couldn’t bring myself to prod it.

  So, instead I whispered, “Would you mind telling me why you settled on Texas?”

  “Settled?” he said.

  “Why you came here,” I explained. “I reckon you might’ve gone anyplace you liked.”

  He raised up on his elbow. “I came for the property,” he said.

  “The land payment?”

  He nodded. “I hear that your Republic pays its men in land.”

  “It was that important to you? Owning some land?”

  “Very much,” he said. “For twenty years I have nothing of my own, nothing whatsoever. All the time I am thinking about a house that is mine. I lie at night and fantasear it: a little property, a little home. I think to have this one day might be to have myself again. It is hard to explique, but it seems to me the reverse of being un esclavo. If esclavos own nothing at all, to own a thing is to be free.” His head canted to one side. “Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” I said, and my throat thickened with regard for him, thinking of how it must have been for him all those years. He didn’t have to go any further into describing the hell he’d endured.

  I felt understood quite well.

  CECELIA

  —TEXAS, 1837–1840—

  The land Samuel surveyed was beautiful: lush and very green. The mesquites were flowered out, all the branches drooping. Thick pasture grass for the horses, the soil black as ink.

  Something had shifted between the two of them. She thought the shift had started that day the Indians encircled them. Or maybe even earlier. Maybe the shift started when Samuel let her hold the gun. Perhaps something was already shifting when Samuel took her from the planter, or in that moment she stood on the stump, staring at him toward the back of the crowd.

  They lived in a dugout the first several weeks, then started building a jacal. The two of them would work all day, cutting trees for timber, gathering sandstone for the walls. She liked searching for rocks, seeing how they fit together, the grain so rough your palms cracked and bled. It felt good, solving the puzzle of it, watching the shanty rise out of the earth.

  At night, they slept on pallets. Two pallets on opposite sides of the room, though they were never more than ten feet apart. He never tried to touch her; he never raised his voice. They worked in the daytime and cooked together at dusk, woke the next day and had their coffee. A comfort rose up between them. That’s how she thought of it: comfort like a warm, rising tide.

  You need to enjoy this, she thought. You’ve come so far.

  And that was true. She marveled at how far she’d travelled. Texas was a dream, but the rest of the earth a nightmare.

  She started having those too, which she thought was strange, because, even in the worst of times, even in Mississippi, she’d never had bad dreams. Maybe if your life was a nightmare, you didn’t need them when you slept. Maybe if your days were a fantasy, the nights paid you back with terror.

  In the early morning, Samuel would hunt and fish, carry back game for their meals. Around the middle of May, he cleared ten acres and started planting corn. He said they could have squash the following year, maybe a little cotton, a couple dozen rows. She could be in charge of that if she liked.

  “Be nice to spin some cloth, wouldn’t it?”

  “You spin some cloth,” she told him. Just the mention of cotton made her furious, and she refused to speak to him the rest of the day. She felt that old panic pumping in her veins. She didn’t say a single word until suppertime when he looked over at her and said, “I can plant the cotton.”

  “That’s good,” she told him. “Because I won’t touch another cotton seed long as I live. I won’t hoe or pick or clean.”

  He stared at her several moments, head tilted to one side.

  “Well,” he said. “You don’t have to.”

  * * *

  What was she to this man? What would she become?

  Lying there one night, she raised up on her elbow and glanced over at him sleeping on his pallet. Moonlight turned his blond hair to silver. He still had something of the boy about him, though he was more powerfully built than any man she’d seen.

  There is no one like him, she thought. Not in all the earth.

  Her throat went tight and she swallowed to loosen it. She lay back down and closed her eyes.

  When she woke the next morning, the smell of autumn was in the air, and Samuel commenced talking about the cabin he’d build them, a good log cabin with puncheon floors, better than bare dirt by a mile.

  He began cutting trees on the hill, hacking down cedars and stripping away their limbs. Clearing ground, levelling it. One day he rode into the town of Bastrop, and when he returned a few hours later, there was a tall black man riding beside him on a chestnut mare. The two of them spent the afternoon hefting the logs Sam had cut, moving them into place. Over the coming weeks, the cabin went up like a spell had raised it. The black man’s name was Jonas. He and Samuel would ride off in the mornings and return around noontime, pulling the trunks of pine trees behind their horses. They hewed these into boards for roof and siding.

  She watched very closely, trying to learn the method of it, but Jonas was so skilled at the labor, it was difficult to see what he was doing. She’d fetch them water from the stream or take up kettles of coffee. Jonas would smile and thank her. His manner was very familiar to her, like the hands she’d known in Virginia: courteous, deferential.

  And then one afternoon, when Sam walked into the woods to retrieve the axe he’d mislaid, Jonas turned to her and all the deference left his face like a mask slipping.

  He cleared his throat, coughing into his hand.

  “There’s a colony across the Rio,” he said. “A whole heap of runaways.”

  “Pardon me?” she said.

  “North of the Sierra Madre,” he said, the slave bleeding from his voice. “Near the town Monclova. In Coahuila, there. Thousands of us living free.”
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  “I don’t understand.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  She stood there a moment. She couldn’t see Sam anymore, but she could hear him crunching through the woods.

  “Is it very far?” she whispered.

  “It’s six hundred miles,” he said.

  “That might as well be a million,” she told him. “And I don’t know this country.”

  “I’d take you,” he said. “They’s folks do it all the time.”

  “Then why are you here to tell me this? Why haven’t you gone yourself?”

  His eyes roved down from her face, to her chest, her hips, then roved their way back up.

  “I been waiting,” he said.

  She shook her head. He was making her awfully nervous.

  “Mister Whipple’s place,” he said. “Not three mile from here. Last farm fore you come to Bastrop. If it’s a night you can get away, you come to the quarters. Whipple don’t keep a watch on us.”

  “You are dangerous,” she said.

  “Last farm fore the town of Bastrop. Not three mile. You come get me anytime.”

  Then Sam emerged from the woods with his axe in hand, walked over to where they stood, and Jonas’s mask slid back in place. When he spoke again, his speech had darkened. The entire conversation they’d just had was like a bubble drifting off, vanishing in the air.

  * * *

  They finished the cabin a few weeks later. She was alone with Jonas twice more, and he brought up the colony both times. She didn’t doubt the truth of what he said at all; it was the six hundred miles that bothered her.

  And Jonas himself, who’d likely be the same as Jubal if she gave him half a chance.

  Black or white, she thought. If they have that mess dangling between their legs, their brains are pure corruption. They can’t see any farther than getting you on your back.

  And yet, that didn’t account for Sam. If all their hearts were selfish, why hadn’t he tried her?

  He’s waiting, she thought. Lying for his chance.

  But hadn’t he had chance aplenty? He could overpower her if he took a mind.

  He cannot outthink you, though. He knows that you are smarter.

  Oh, I am smart, all right. Sit around and argue myself into a stupor. I am the smartest one in all the world. Run five times, caught five times. Just so smart I can hardly stand it.

  And why was she caught? It was not just lack of knowledge that did her in. It was that she’d run from white to white—this white place to that white place. She’d never had a destination outside the States, never had the chance of reaching another country.

  And here is this woodsman to teach you things you didn’t know. Here are opportunities you never had.

  Here was Jonas with his stories of a runaway colony.

  She didn’t trust Jonas, but she didn’t have to trust him.

  Use him, she thought. Use his dangling brain. Use Samuel with his lack of fear and his know-how for a thousand things.

  But you are free now. For the very first time.

  Am I? she wondered. What if it’s just a story to keep me here.

  She woke one morning on her pallet and sat there chewing all of this. Samuel was already on a hunt, the cabin quiet except for the creak of joists when a breeze blew through. The smell of cedar was overpowering. You grew used to it throughout the day, then went to sleep, and woke with the scent in your nostrils like something had crawled inside your skull.

  She crossed the room to fill the kettle and saw he’d left water in it for her. He had stoked the fire before he stepped out, and there was a handful of beans that he’d pounded to dust with the coffee stone; all she had to do was put the kettle on the grate.

  She stood there looking at it for several moments. She felt irritated with him, though he’d done nothing to warrant this frustration.

  If he was just like the others, it would be no problem. She could have scraped him into that bucket with everyone else she despised. The bucket made sense. You didn’t have to waste thought on the bucket-people anymore.

  But this man wouldn’t fit in the bucket.

  He steals you, then asks what you want to do. Carries you off to Texas, then lets you set up house. He’s white and free, has never known the hand of slavery, and here he sets out coffee fixings, tiptoeing about to let you sleep.

  You must use him, she thought. Learn his fearlessness till you can wear it like a skin.

  * * *

  That winter, she had him teach her a host of things. How to load and shoot the rifle. How to judge distance and read the wind.

  “What does wind have to do with it?” she asked.

  “It pushes the ball,” he said. “Shoves it wide.”

  This seemed unlikely, that wind could catch a rifle ball in flight, but a lot of what she learned from him was different from the world she knew. You tanned deer hides with the animal’s own brains. You knew where a bear was feeding from its scat. When you got lost in the piney woods of that country, you could discover your trail by circling back on it, searching for the smallest signs: change of color, needles kicked out of place, the scars your shoes left on bare dirt or fallen branches. Always keeping the sun between yourself and your footprints. He was so good at it. He read tracks like a sentence across the page.

  It occurred to her that the things they knew and didn’t know fit together quite perfectly, and this understanding unsettled her even more. His patience was unnerving, the fact that he was willing to teach her to hunt, and shoot, and track. That when it came down to it he was teaching her how to run.

  Who is he? she’d wonder, lying there on her pallet those winter nights, having learned yet another skill that showed her how doomed her previous attempts had been.

  She thought, Maybe I have become used to such poor treatment that anything else undoes me.

  She felt guilty about this, and that made her furious.

  He was toying with her; he was driving her mad. He saw what other white men hadn’t: the way to truly destroy her was with generosity and care.

  She lay there and turned that over in her mind. She drew a deep breath and blew it toward the ceiling.

  No, Cecelia. You are toying with yourself.

  Spring put buds on the tree limbs and the days grew warm. One morning, Sam was teaching her to fire the pistol. She held it just like he showed her, planting her feet exactly as he said. But when she pulled the trigger and the gun went off, a stinging grit flew into her eyes.

  She dropped the pistol and began to claw at her face. There was a feeling like ants beneath her eyelids, burrowing back into her skull.

  Sam’s voice was in her ear, saying, “Don’t paw at it, now. Don’t scratch.” He got hold of her wrists and held them very tight.

  “Try and look at me,” he said.

  She couldn’t do that, couldn’t get her eyelids open. She tried to pull away from him, but he was so strong.

  “Easy now,” he said. “Open up for me.”

  She growled at him, the ants digging farther in. She felt his beard brush up against her face, then something warm and wet swiping her left eye, working between the lids. It certainly wasn’t pleasant, but he was taking the sting away, bit by bit.

  When she blinked, her vision was blurry. Sam had let go of her wrists and was holding her head in both hands. He leaned closer and went to work on her other eye. She’d thought he had a damp cloth, but there was no cloth. He’d used his tongue to lick out the grit, and here he started doing it again.

  It was a ridiculous thing for someone to do to you, but as it was helping, she let him lick away. He went from one eye to the other, back and forth, lapping her eyes with his tongue.

  She started to cry. It wasn’t fear, but relief. She realized she was going to be all right, and she realized that she couldn’t take this anymore. The closeness, the
confusion. She wouldn’t lie awake wondering what she was to this man. She wouldn’t do it.

  Tonight, she thought. Last farm before the town of Bastrop. I’ll wait until he falls asleep.

  And so, she lay on her pallet that night, watching the firelight flicker over his face. It did not seem real there could be someone like this. You won’t last, she thought. The world won’t let you. That stirred something inside her and she knew that it was time.

  She moved about the cabin silent as smoke, eased the door open, stepped outside, started easing the door back into place. The hinges creaked, and she stopped and stood there, her heart like a fist, forcing herself to breathe.

  Out in the cedarwood stable, she bridled Honey, draped the saddle blanket over her, and then the saddle. She wrapped the latigo, drew the cinch tight, fit the hole over the tongue, then pulled back-slack to lock everything into place.

  She was aboard the horse, about a dozen yards from the stable, when she stopped and looked back at the cabin. There was a soft breeze coming through the trees, a little cool.

  Don’t, she thought.

  She sat there. She felt like she was making a mistake.

  But wasn’t it a mistake to stay?

  Last farm before Bastrop, she told herself. Turn around and ride.

  He’ll wonder about me.

  Then let him wonder. You didn’t ask for this.

  No, she thought. I didn’t know it was something you could ask for. I didn’t even know it existed.

  And here she was running.

  Riding, the voice corrected her. You are riding.

  But she wasn’t riding. She was sitting there staring back.

  * * *

  He was still asleep when she opened the cabin door and stepped inside. Still asleep when she crossed the room and pulled his knife from its sheath. She stepped up beside the pallet. Her heart was going like mad.

  Cut him, she thought. If you cut him, he won’t have power over you.

  He doesn’t have power over me now.